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The Second Coming of Gingrich

By Ross Douthat November 15, 2011 10:31 pmNovember 15, 2011 10:31 pm

Rick Tyler knew it would come to this. When Newt Gingrich kicked off his presidential campaign in May by criticizing Congressman Paul Ryan’s Medicare reforms as “right-wing social engineering,” thus incurring the wrath of the very conservatives that he presumably needed to win over, there was a rush to write the former House speaker’s political obituary. But Tyler, then Gingrich’s spokesman, had an answer for the doubters – a statement so epic that it deserves to be reproduced in its entirety.

The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding. Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.

We all laughed at this here in Washington, swirling our martinis and nibbling our canapés at our fancy cocktail parties. Then we laughed even louder just three weeks later, when Tyler himself joined the mass exodus of staffers from Gingrich’s seemingly-doomed campaign.

But who’s laughing now? Michele Bachmann has faded, Rick Perry has flopped, and the Herman Cain phenomenon is on life support. And out of the billowing smoke and dust of debates and gaffes and brain freezes, Gingrich has re-emerged, once again ready to lead those who want their politicians to be able to remember the details of recent American military interventions and the names of the cabinet agencies they want to abolish.

True, Gingrich’s rise in the polls may be temporary. There’s still time for Rick Santorum or even Jon Huntsman to surge, or for Ron Paul to expand his support beyond his small, fierce circle of admirers. But not that much time. We’re in November, the primaries are looming, and the former speaker suddenly has a clear path to the great prize of this Republican presidential campaign: The chance to finish a respectable second to Mitt Romney.

In a sense, this is a baffling turn of events. The whole theory of the Bachmann-Perry-Cain merry-go-round has been that Tea Party voters are desperately seeking a candidate less ideologically compromised than Romney. But as conservative commentators from Jennifer Rubin to Michael Brendan Dougherty have pointed out, Gingrich has a long record of ideological compromise as well. Indeed, from his past support for an individual mandate in health care to his flirtations with a cap-and-trade system to his criticisms of the Ryan budget, Gingrich’s deviations from current conservative orthodoxy are arguably as substantial as Romney’s.

Yet this logic misses the secret of Gingrich’s current appeal. The former speaker is less a traditional conservative than he is a kind of right-wing futurist, most at home rhapsodizing about computer revolutions and brain science breakthroughs. But whereas most right-wing futurists tend to be libertarians who take a somewhat jaundiced view of partisan politics, for Gingrich civilization itself hangs in the balance in every election cycle. The glittering future he descries can only be won through a confrontation with the enemies of progress – namely, liberal Democrats.

The Daily Caller’s James Poulos calls this the Gingrich proposition: The belief that American politics needs to be interpreted by (as Gingrich puts it) going “up a couple of levels” and seeing things from a world-historical perspective – with Newt himself, of course, as the Churchill/De Gaulle/Reagan of our hinge-of-history moment.

As a leader, this messianic style has often been Gingrich’s great flaw. It made him a polarizing figure throughout his speakership, and it’s ensured that his genuine fascination with public policy almost always takes a back seat to the urge to denounce his political opponents in the most florid and apocalyptic language possible.

But for conservative primary voters who don’t want to nominate a mere technocrat for what they consider an era-defining election, Gingrich’s willingness to go “up a couple of levels” and frame 2012 in Manichaean terms is a selling point, not a liability. And after the implosion of so many alternatives, his Churchillian posturing might be all the reason they need to embrace him as the anti-Romney, even if doing so requires overlooking his various ideological deviations.

Romney will probably welcome that contest. Because Gingrich has so many heterodoxies in his own past, he’ll have a hard time attacking the former Massachusetts governor as a flip-flopper. Because he’s had more marriages than some polygamists, he won’t be able to exploit discomfort with Romney’s religious background, as Mike Huckabee deftly did in 2008.

Instead, all Gingrich will be able to do is argue – as he did recently – that his ex-consultant rival is just a “competent manager,” whereas he’s a true “change agent.” For Romney, that’s a far less devastating attack than others he might have faced – and what’s more, it actually dovetails perfectly with his planned general election campaign, in which he wants to be perceived as the competent alternative to Barack Obama’s failed attempt at revolutionary change.

Obviously, Romney’s ideal primary scenario would be one in which all his rivals somehow self-destruct and he coasts to victory in every primary or caucus. But seeing Newt Gingrich emerge as his most plausible challenger comes a pretty close second.

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Weekly pieces by the Op-Ed columnists Charles Blow and Ross Douthat, as well as regular posts from contributing writers like Thomas B. Edsall and Timothy Egan. This is also the place for opinionated political thinkers from all over the United States to make their arguments about everything connected to the 2012 election. Yes, everything: the candidates, the states, the caucuses, the issues, the rules, the controversies, the primaries, the ads, the electorate, the present, the past and even the future.